First Published in 2018 by:
The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis the-site.org.uk
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Edited, designed and produced by:
Nic Bayley, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, Val Parks, Barry Watt and Robert Weiss.
Editorial Advisory Panel
Julia Borossa, Bernard Burgoyne, Olga Cox Cameron, John Fletcher, Stephen Frosh, Chris Hauke, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Dany Nobus, Chris Oakley, Haya Oakley, Joanna Ryan, Naomi Segal, Ross Skelton, Paul Verhaeghe, Rob Weatherill, Peter Wood, Amy Wygant.
Notes for Future Contributors
Sitegeist uses a peer-review system based around electronic submission. Authors are invited to send abstracts of not more than 200 words to the editors. Calls for Papers are made, on occasion, and are publicised on our website: the-site-org.uk and Twitter feed: @SITE_GEIST.
Editorial
Over 11 and 12 March 2017, The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis hosted a conference, in partnership with the Freud Museum London, entitled ‘Transgender, Gender & Psychoanalysis.’ It ran alongside an extraordinary range of events, including an art exhibition organised and put together by a highly dedicated group of Site trainees. These events were conceived as...
Scenes of Self-Conduct: Transnational Subjectivities from Tehran to Laplanche
This paper was previously published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Volume 4, no. 3-4, pp. 654-661. Copyright, 2017, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press. www.dukepress.edu Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran (2014) narrates a fantasy reported by several candidates for...
Bracha L. Ettinger, Jacques Lacan and Tiresias: The Other Sexual Difference
This essay is about Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet in the Oedipal trilogy and how he1 ((I am using the masculine pronoun to reference Tiresias because the prophet lives most of his life as a man. ))animates what Israeli feminist psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger calls an Other sexual difference. This Other sexual difference must be...
The Couple in Transition
Abstract This paper provides an overview of the particular challenges couples face when a partner decides to transition. It examines the complexities relating to gender and sexuality and the ways in which these are played out within the couple relationship in the context of transitioning. Factors which enable partners to transition together with those which...
Art, Science and Witnessing, Or, what Laura Made
I made something that addressed the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis’s 2017 conference on Gender, Transgender, and Psychoanalysis. The Site had offered the trainees the opportunity to produce an artistic fringe as our contribution to the conference. My work would be about psychoanalysis and about—well, not about trans; about non-binary; about me. Amongst other identities, I’m...
The Woman in the Portrait
Good evening ladies, gentlemen and everyone else, and welcome to the Tate Modern. The image you see is Self-Portrait with Model by German artist Christian Schad, known as ‘the painter with the scalpel’ for the cutting, forensic nature of his work, and it is on loan from a private collector. The son of a wealthy...
Review: Class and Psychoanalysis: Landscapes of Inequality, by Dr Joanna Ryan, Routledge, London & New York, 2017 ISBN 978-1-138- 88551-6
Joanna Ryan was my supervisor during the second half of my training at the Philadelphia Association and for some time after that, and I am one of the people she interviewed during the preparatory work that would culminate in this timely, authoritative and comprehensive (yet concise) work. I gained much from our middle-class/working-class creative coupling...
Review: The Anti-Oedipus Complex: Lacan, Critical Theory and Postmodernism by Rob Weatherill, Routledge, 2017
Martin McDonagh, the director of the award winning ‘Three Billboards’ film had this to say, “I’m coming from a punk rock background: The Clash and the Pogues. It’s all about trying to shake things up. Writing is about lying, telling tales. You are taking people to places that they hadn’t thought about before” (the latter...
Fidelity and Invention Review: What Are Perversions? Sexuality, Ethics, Psychoanalysis by Sergio Benvenuto, Karnac 2016
It is certainly on the basis of his atopia, of the nowhereness of his being, that Socrates sparked off a whole line of research… Jacques Lacan, Seminar VIII: Transference The question of the formation and authorization of the psychoanalyst was long taken for granted following the guild model of psychoanalytic institutes under the ambit of...
Review: Freud in his Time and Ours by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, 2016
There seems to be an enduring appetite for biographies and autobiographies, judging from lists of best-selling books. Perhaps this can be ascribed to our curiosity or, to phrase it even more in the vernacular, nosiness. The latter seems an appropriate term in the context of Freud, whose allegiance to Fleiss and his frankly psychotic theories...
Reviews: Freud in Cambridge. John Forrester and Laura Cameron. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 2017. 695pp. ISBN 978-0- 521-86190-8. Psychoanalysis in Britain, 1893-1913: Histories and Historiography. Philip Kuhn. Lexington Books: London and New York. 2017. 444pp. ISBN 978-1-498-50522-2.
This review is dedicated to the memory of John Forrester (1949 – 2015). On February 10, 1958, Mervyn Jones visited his father Ernest Jones in University College Hospital London, for what would be the final time. Now aged 79, Jones was incurably ill with liver cancer, bed bound and delirious with pain. Occasionally lapsing into...
Review: An Exhibition at Drayton Hall Community Centre—A Fringe Event of The Site’s Transgender, Gender & Psychoanalysis Conference
I was asked to write a review after having seen the exhibition; this is more a reflection of my experience at the exhibition than a comment on the artists’ work. Even though I saw the show a second time, my main impression is from the private view. Listed as a fringe event, an exhibition that...
Notes on Contributors
Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist who works on political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in transnational modernist and contemporary postcolonial cultures, including the Middle East, Africa, Europe and the United States. She is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada) and...
Call for Writing
Sitegeist was founded with the intention of promoting varied, lively and creative approaches in writing to the questions of psychoanalysis today. Our next issue, number 14, will be on the subject of The Death Drive, to be published in early 2019. Abstracts and ideas for reviews are very welcome and should be sent to the...